Chapter 15: Lab Results
The suitcase was open. I was not packing, I was throwing -- hurling -- my clothes into it. Fuck this, I was thinking. Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this. I'll be fucked if I'm going to let this fucking asshole play with my fucking mind. Fuck him. Fuck.
After Adam left, it had taken me close to five minutes to move. When I was finally able to break my eyes away from the door before which I had last seen him, I wept. Uncontrollably. Catharsis? No. It couldn't be. Shame.
Humiliation. Impotence. Fury. I was a human, which is to say I was an animal. Fight or flight was taking over. I could not fight him. Fuck the summer. Fuck the pay. Fuck the research. Fuck him.
I would not be manipulated. I would not be played with, or worse, toyed with. I would not be struck! I would not be made to feel that this was the way I wanted to be treated. Wait. Was I feeling that this was the way I wanted to be treated? Fuck that. I will not second guess myself. Fuck him.
I didn't care if Corey had it coming. I didn't care if some significant part of me took glee in the idea that the retribution for a fag-bashing was the basher getting fucked up the ass. I didn't care if I hadn't seen that coming, or that if it were anyone else, while I would not have approved per se, I would not necessarily have vocally disapproved. He wasn't right. He couldn't be right. I was fucked up? He was fucked up!
I slammed the suitcase shut, only to have to yank it open again realizing that I hadn't cleaned out my bathroom. I collected my toiletries, and began throwing them onto the bed. The phone rang. Fuck.
"What," I said, answering it.
"Mark?"
"Who's this?"
"Mark, are you okay? It's Sharon."
"Sharon." I knew the name, of course, but I just couldn't connect it to anyone who would be calling me there at the camp.
"Mark, is everything alright? You're scaring me."
"Sharon...Sharon!" Of course. It was Sharon! "I'm sorry. I just had a really bad day. How did you get my number?"
"Return address on the package you sent. I called the police station in the town. They gave it to me."
"You called the police?" She was doing a good job of distracting me from my rage. "Why?"
"I had to call you. I had to call you with the results." I began to hear her voice -- really hear it -- for the first time. She was excited.
"The results? Oh, right. The results. Cool. What did you find?"
"Mark," she said, clearly unable to contain her enthusiasm, "listen. First, we have to get something straight."
"Sure. What?"
"I want co-authorship rights."
"Co-authorship? Sharon, it's for my dis. You can't co-author a dis."
There was an electric silence at the other end of the phone. Co-authoring rights? What had she found?
"Then Mark -- I want patent rights. Fifty percent."
"What?"
"Patent rights," she repeated. "I want fifty percent of the patent rights."
"Patent rights?"
"Mark, you won't believe what I got here." She was giddy. Was she drunk? Her excitement began to be infectious. Patent rights? What could be patented? I sent her a uni and a jock strap.
"Patent rights? Sure," I said. "Sure, Sharon. Fine. You got patent rights."
"Wait a minute," she said. From the other end of the phone, I heard steps, rummaging, steps again.
"I got a tape recorder here. Wait a minute." I heard the click as she apparently turned it on. She said her name. She said the date. She said she was talking to me. She asked if I understood that she was recording the conversation. I told her I did. She said that I had sent her a sample, and had asked her to isolate any compounds she could find. She said that I had agreed to give her fifty percent of the patent rights for the discovery. She asked me if this was correct.
"Yes, Sharon," I said, now as curious as I was excited, "fifty percent of the patent rights. Now what the hell did you find?"
I heard the tape recorder click off.
"You're not going to believe this," she said.
"It's full of ER-10s, ER-11s, testosterone cypionate, enanthate, methyl testosterone, basically androgens up the wazoo, and, get this -- there's s DMSO variant that I think is naturally occurring." She was practically screaming into the phone, and talking so quickly that even if I knew the words I would not be able to understand her.
"Whoa, there, girl," I said. "Soft scientist here. Small words. Small words. And take a breath, okay?"
She laughed.
"Okay," she said. "It's so intense, you know? Okay. So here's what happened. You send me this leotard and a jock strap, right?"
"It's called a uni."
"Whatever. Just shut up and listen. So I pass a solvent through the cloth, and extract the organic molecules, right? Like the sweat and stuff."
"Right."
"I do a capillary electrophoresis on it..."
"Clicks and whistles, Sharon. Speak English."
"Sorry. I do a process which separates the different compounds from each other. So now I have a bunch of molecules grouped by type, right? I do a mass spectrometry on them -- that's a way you can figure out what you're looking at once you got it -- and I find ER-10, ER-11..."
"Wait, wait. You separate the stuff from the clothes, then you separate the stuff into its component parts. Then you figure out what the component parts are."
"Right."
"Okay. So what are the component parts?"
"That's what I'm telling you."
"No TLAs, please."
"TLA?"
"It's a three-letter-acronym for Three-Letter-Acronym."
She laughed.
"Okay. The boy is sloughing hormones. Hormones and pheromones, really. In spectacular numbers. Tremendously elevated levels. He's hyperproducing them."
"If that were the case, wouldn't we expect to see some clinical manifestations? Serious hypertension at the very least. Too much hair, aggressive behavior, the other effects of hormones in the blood?"
"That's just the thing. It's not in the blood. He's sloughing it."
"Sloughing?"
"It's passing through his skin. He's not storing it. He's discharging it. And you want to know how?" She was clearly in her element, and loving it. One could hear the smile over the phone.
"Yes. Please do tell."
"Well, partner, that's the thing. He's making this DMSO variant."
"DMSO?"
"Dimethalsulfoxide. It's a solvent. He's making a kind of it naturally. I've never seen it before."
"So what?"
"It's a transdermal solvent, Mark."
"...And that is important to me -- why?"
"It's transdermal. It works through the skin. Like the patch. The nicotine patch. They put the nicotine on the patch, right? But how to they get your skin to absorb it. You ever wonder?"
"Actually, I never had. I just assumed the nicotine was absorbed through the skin."
"No. Skin is a really good semipermeable barrier. It lets sweat out, but almost nothing in. So chemists worked for years -- years, Mark! -- on creating these things called transdermal carriers. They're catalysts that...how can I put this? Not only can they be absorbed by the skin, but they attach themselves to molecules and carry them through the skin too. Do you understand?"
"So far, yes."
"Ok. There was this one carrier called DMSO. You mix stuff with the DMSO, you touch the DMSO, and…poof! The stuff is absorbed into your body. Pretty good if you want to deliver drugs, right?"
"Sure. No pills, no suppositories, no shots."
"Right. But the problem was that the carrier was so good that it took everything with it. Everything. You have a tube of ointment with DMSO in it, right? And you're squeezing out a dab, and it falls on the ground. Touches the baseboard, which has lead paint. You clean it up. Get some on your skin, and boom. You're full of lead paint. You put this shit on a crayon, touch it, and you got crayon coursing through your blood. See why it was withdrawn from the market?"
"Yeh. Dangerous. Got it."
"So this sample you gave me. I found sweat, salt, normal stuff. I found all the hormones and pheromones. They were easy. But there was one more compound. Couldn't figure out what it was. I finally did an x-ray crystalography on it. That's what took me so long. It turns out that it's pretty fucking close to DMSO. But it's volatile. It's volatile! Do you understand what that means?"
"Yes," I said, trying to keep up. "Evaporates quickly. Becomes airborne."
"And he's making it. He's making it naturally. And Adam," she said, pausing for dramatic effect, "it's probably worth millions if we can synthesize it."
That last bit of information went right by me. Adam was beginning to make sense to me, and that in itself was a treasure.
"So what you're telling me is that this guy produces elevated levels of hormones and pheromones, sweats them out so they don't affect him, then, because he's also oozing this DSMO shit..."
"DMSO."
"Whatever. Because he's oozing this shit, the hormones and pheromones become airborne, and are absorbed by the people around him?"
"Well, it's a little more complicated in terms of why he's sweating them out, but in essence, bingo."
"Aren't they also absorbed by him too?"
"Yeh, but he's found a way to slough them. So they just come right back out again. You got a freak, here, Mark."
"I sure do."
"But a freak who will make us rich."
The idea of 'rich' still didn't sink in. The idea of 'millions' had not hit its Mark, as it were. The idea of 'deus ex machina' hadn't even reared its ugly heads. Instead, the idea that rang resoundingly through my brain was that I had him. I understood his power. And because I understood it, I could counteract it. I would not be powerless before him.
"Is there a cure -- a blocker for it?"
"Cure? Fuck that, Mark," she said, "didn't you hear me? We're rich! I'm 23, and I'm going to be rich! Do you know how much pharmaceutical companies will pay for the rights to this? Do you have any idea how important this is? Fuck," she said, "they'll probably compete for it with the NSA! We're rich! Rich, rich, rich! Do you understand?"
"I'm beginning to get a clue," I said. "I'm beginning to get a clue."
I dreamed that night. In my dream there was a hand. It was his hand, callused, large, angry, sweet. It was stroking me. The dream cross-faded in the surreal way only that dreams and Garcia Marquez can manage. Now, I was sucking on it, suckling, taking succor. Another cross-fade, and it was striking me, the sting of contact making me shiver with a terrible satisfaction and desire. Then it was all three at once, the hand somehow stoking, slapping, nursing at the same time. It faded, and I was left with an overpowering emptiness and need. Then he was there. Looking at me. Looking into me, in all his arrogant, stunning perfection. He began to walk forward towards me, his gaze never wavering. Closer and closer. My skin presented no barrier. Approaching, he walked into me as I absorbed him. Adam was inside me, completing me, making me whole. When he walked through me, passing out behind, I was devastated. Lacking, inadequate, imperfect, unfinished. In my dream, for the second time that night, I wept.
I awoke shivering and drenched in sweat. Trying to gain hold of myself, I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face. Looking into the mirror, I desperately tried to escape the meaning of the dream. The reflection that stared back at me was drawn and pale. Well, I thought, there's encouragement in Freud. Even he said, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."